AI & Colonial Logic: Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz & Thema Monroe-White

Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to confront something older: the colonial logic embedded in how we define intelligence, progress, neutrality, knowledge, and the human itself? This conversation brought together voices working across technology, culture, race, power, and society to examine what AI reveals about the systems that built it. Rather than treating bias as a technical glitch, this conversation asks what must be unlearned at the level of worldview, institution, data, design, and collective imagination. Facilitated by Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz, this dialogue explored AI through a decolonial lens asking necessary questions: Whose knowledge is extracted? Whose futures are optimized away? Whose bodies are surveilled? Whose intelligence is dismissed? And what can liberated knowledge make possible beyond colonial technology? This is not a conversation about making machines more ethical within the same old systems. It is an invitation to question the systems themselves, and to imagine intelligence beyond extraction, domination, and control. &nbsp; Topics 00:00 Welcome, and ZacaTechO 00:04 Why researchers are trained to disconnect 00:09 Red teaming, and what it misses 00:12 John is the doctor, Juan is the patient 00:18 Christian's first encounter with ChatGPT 00:21 How bias became normal 00:26 Justice AI as a model of refusal 00:29 Breaking a language model in the classroom 00:32 One model to rule them all, and the logic of eugenics 00:35 Galton, Namibia, and the through line 00:39 What do we mean by intelligence? 00:41 Emancipatory data science, and where to begin Guests Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is an Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist and technologist. He is the founder of Justice AI GPT and author of the Decolonial Intelligence Algorithmic Framework. He studies how colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas. justiceaigpt.ca LinkedIn Academia.edu Profiled in Forbes, September 2025 Substack Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies. Faculty profile, George Mason University <a href="htt